Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change (4 page)

Our identity, which seems so reliable, so substantial, is in fact very fluid, very dynamic. There are unlimited possibilities to what we might think, what we might feel, and how we might experience reality. We have what it takes to free ourselves from the suffering of a fixed identity and connect with the fundamental slipperiness and mystery of our being, which has no fixed identity. Your sense of yourself—who you think you are at the relative level—is a very restricted version of who you truly are. But the good news is that you can use
your direct experience—who you seem to be at this very moment—as the doorway to your true nature. By fully touching this relative moment of time—the sound you’re hearing, the smell you’re smelling, the pain or comfort you’re feeling right now—by being fully present to your experience, you contact the unlimited openness of your being.

All of our habitual patterns are efforts to maintain a predictable identity: “I am an angry person”; “I am a friendly person”; “I am a lowly worm.” We can work with these mental habits when they arise and stay with our experience not just when we’re meditating but also in daily life. Whether we’re alone or with others, no matter what we’re doing, uneasiness can float to the surface at any time. We may think those poignant, piercing feelings are signs of danger, but in fact, they’re signals that we’ve just contacted the fundamental fluidity of life. Rather than hiding from these feelings by staying in the bubble of ego, we can let the truth of how things really are get through. These moments are great opportunities. Even if we’re surrounded by people—in a business meeting, say—when we feel uncertainty arising, we can just breathe and be present with the feelings. We don’t have to panic or withdraw into ourselves. There’s no need to respond habitually. No need to fight or flee. We can stay engaged with others and at the same time acknowledge what we’re feeling.

The instructions, in their simplest form, have three basic steps:

Be fully present.

Feel your heart.

And engage the next moment without an agenda.

I work with this method on the spot, right in the middle of things. The more I stay present in formal meditation, the more familiar this process becomes, and the easier it is to do it in the midst of everyday situations. But regardless of where we practice staying present, it will put us in touch with the uncertainty and change that are inherent in being alive. It will give us the chance to train in staying awake to, and present with, all that we’ve previously run from.

The Three Commitments are three levels of working with groundlessness. Underlying them all is the basic instruction to make friends with yourself—to be honest with yourself and kind. This begins with the willingness to stay present whenever you experience uneasiness. As these feelings arise, rather than running away, you lean into them. Instead of trying to get rid of thoughts and feelings, you become curious about them. As you become accustomed to experiencing sensation free of interpretation, you will come to understand that contacting the fundamental ambiguity of being human provides a precious opportunity—the opportunity to be with life just as it is, the opportunity to experience the freedom of life without a story line.

The First Commitment

Committing to Not Cause Harm

3

Laying the Foundation

T
OGETHER
,
THE
T
HREE
C
OMMITMENTS
support us in relaxing with the fundamental dynamic quality of our lives. But what does it mean to live by commitment? This is an interesting question.

As the dictionary defines it, a commitment is a pledge, something that binds us emotionally and mentally to someone or something or a course of action. The way Tibetan Buddhism traditionally views it, living by commitment means more than simply acting or not acting. When we make a commitment, we set our intention clearly and know what we’re vowing to do or not do. This is why it’s so powerful. Chögyam Trungpa said that a vow to not kill, for example, has more power than just not killing. If a lion or tiger doesn’t kill, that’s virtuous, but when causes and conditions come together, the lion or tiger will almost certainly kill because that’s its nature. For us, however, taking a vow—making a commitment—allows us to not act reflexively when we have an urge. We think twice before speaking or acting.

Commitment is at the very heart of freeing ourselves from old habits and fears. If we embark on the journey of doing this, it only makes sense to begin by laying a solid foundation. We can do this by working with the first commitment, the commitment to not cause harm. This is
traditionally called the Pratimoksha Vow, or vow of personal liberation—liberation from the suffering that comes with resisting the reality of our situation, the fundamental groundlessness of life. Once, when Chögyam Trungpa was teaching about personal liberation, he described the first commitment as “saving yourself from samsaric neurosis.” From the suffering of everyday life, in other words. As Khandro Rinpoche, another Tibetan Buddhist teacher, explains it, this commitment protects us from falling into or chasing after unnecessary cravings, unnecessary aggression, and unnecessary indifference. It’s the foundation of the other two commitments—the vow to help others and the vow to embrace the world just as it is—and opens the doorway to relaxing joyfully with fluidity and change.

So how does the first commitment work? It involves working with your mind, your thoughts, and your emotions in order to notice and clearly acknowledge when you’re trying to escape the fundamental uncertainty of life. What are you doing just to fill up time and space, to avoid being present? How are you acting in habitual ways? The first commitment supports us in not escaping into our old patterns—in seeing very clearly that we’re about to exit, then making a conscious decision not to do it.

We all have our familiar exits: zoning out in front of the TV, compulsively checking e-mail, coming home at night and having three or four or six drinks, overeating, overworking. Sometimes our exit is just chatter, chatter, chatter—aimless chatter. Speech is a big part of what this commitment works with. There are endless ways we use our speech to distract ourselves. And not just talking aloud. Mentally we’re engaged in almost constant conversation with ourselves. One of the reasons I appreciate meditation
retreats is that I can get a really close look at how even in total silence I still keep myself busy with my mind.

The first commitment is about refraining from speech and actions that are harmful to ourselves and others. It liberates us by making us far more aware of what we’re feeling, so that whenever the urge to lie or slander or take something that isn’t given to us comes up—whenever we have the urge to act out our desires or aggression, or escape in any form—we refrain.

As a support in refraining from harmful speech and actions, it can be really helpful to commit to four traditional precepts, or directives: the precepts to not kill, to not steal, to not lie, and to not harm others with our sexual activity. We can commit to these precepts for one day or one week or a lifetime. There are hundreds of rules for fully ordained monks and nuns, but the Buddha said that the most important were these four. Basically, following the precepts gives us space to examine every nuance of the urge to express ourselves negatively and then, while fully acknowledging our feelings, make the choice to not do anything that would cause harm.

In its simplest terms, then, the path of liberation begins with refraining from hurting ourselves and others. When many people hear “refrain,” they automatically think “repression” and assume that when an urge comes up, they should just push it under. In therapeutic circles, there’s an ongoing debate about which causes more harm: repression or acting out. To me, they’re equally harmful. Once you speak or act, there’s a chain reaction, and other people’s emotions become involved. Every time you speak or act out of aggression or craving or jealousy or envy or pride, it’s like dropping a pebble into a pool of water and watching
the ripples fan out; everyone around you is affected. Similarly, if you repress your feelings, everyone is affected by that too, because you’re walking around like a keg of dynamite that’s about to go off.

Refraining from speaking or acting out slows us down and enables us to see our habitual responses very, very clearly. Until we can see our reactions, we can never know precisely what causes us to stay stuck and what will help us to get free. It’s important, however, to refrain in a spirit of
compassionate
self-reflection. We look at what we say and do based on a genuine trust in our basic goodness. We trust that we’re fundamentally openhearted and open-minded and that when we’re not confounded by our emotions, we know what will help and what will hurt.

When you come from the view that you’re fundamentally good rather than fundamentally flawed, as you see yourself speak or act out, as you see yourself repress, you will have a growing understanding that you’re not a bad person who needs to shape up but a good person with temporary, malleable habits that are causing you a lot of suffering. And then, in that spirit, you can become very familiar with these temporary but strongly embedded habits. You can see them so clearly and so compassionately that you don’t continue to strengthen them.

The process of seeing your habits clearly is sometimes compared to having a big, blank canvas, then taking a paintbrush and making a dot on it. The empty canvas represents basic goodness, your basic unfettered nature; the dot represents a habit. It can be a very small dot, but against the empty canvas it really stands out. From this perspective, you can see very clearly whether you spoke or acted, or didn’t speak or didn’t act. So you can begin to train in
knowing what you’re doing when you’re doing it—and in being kind to yourself about your speech and actions. You rejoice when you’re able to acknowledge that you’re caught in an old pattern and when you catch yourself before you speak or act out. We all carry around trunk loads of old habits, but very fortunately for us, they’re removable. They don’t have to weigh us down permanently. Refraining is very powerful because it gives us an opportunity to acknowledge when we’re caught and then to get unstuck.

Each time we
don’t
refrain but speak or act out instead, we’re strengthening old habits, strengthening the
kleshas,
and strengthening the fixed sense of self. We’re keeping the whole mechanism of suffering going. But when we refrain, we’re allowing ourselves to feel the underlying uncertainty—that edgy, restless energy—without trying to escape. The escape routes are there, but we’re not using them. We’re getting in touch with the feeling of fundamental uneasiness and relaxing with it rather than being run around by our thoughts and emotions. We’re not trying to eradicate thoughts; we’re just training ourselves not to be so enmeshed in them. Dzigar Kongtrül has a sign on the front door of his retreat cabin that reads, “Don’t believe everything you think.” That’s the basic idea here.

As we become more conscious of our thoughts and emotions and look at them with kindhearted interest and curiosity, we begin to see how we armor ourselves against pain. And we see how that armor also cuts us off from the pain—and the beauty—of other people. But as we let go of our repetitive stories and fixed ideas about ourselves—particularly deep-seated feelings of “I’m not okay”—the armor starts to fall apart, and we open into the spaciousness of our true nature, into who we really are beyond our transitory thoughts
and emotions. We see that our armor is made up of nothing more than habits and fears, and we begin to feel that we can let those go.